Friday, December 20, 2013

What if God Was One of Us? (a sermon for our 'When Christmas Hurts' service)

Back in the mid-1990s Eric Bazilian wrote a simple little song that became
a smash hit for Joan Osborne: ‘What if God was one of us?’ I’m sure many of you
will know it. I’ve always thought the first line was kind of ironic, because
that’s exactly what Christianity has always taught: that God did become one of
us. God came into this world he had created, he was born as a human being, and
he shared all the joys and the pains of our human existence.

And that’s really what Christmas is all about. In our culture, Christmas
has become a time for parties and eating and drinking, and buying and selling
and giving presents and celebrating and general jollification. But the first
Christmas wasn’t like that at all. Yes, there was joy: ‘good news of great joy
for all the people’. But there was also hardship, fear, misunderstanding,
oppression, anger, and violence. This is the sort of world that Jesus knows
very well. Let’s try to think our way back into the story for a few minutes.

A young Jewish girl, probably in her mid-teens, comes to her fiancée and
says, “I’m pregnant”. Her fiancée knows that the child is not his, but when he
asks the obvious question – ‘Who did it?’ – she replies, ‘God’.

The Bible doesn’t report this conversation, but I think if I’d been in
Joseph’s shoes I’d have been a little skeptical about that story! And in fact
we’re told that he planned to break his engagement to Mary as quietly as
possible, until an angel came to him in a dream and told him that Mary had been
telling him the truth. I wonder how you would have felt in her shoes? ‘My
fiancée won’t believe me until God sends an angel to tell him I’m right!’

But when Mary’s belly started to get bigger, I expect the rumours really started
to fly. In that culture, the law had harsh penalties for sex outside of
marriage – death by stoning, in fact. Of course, it was often not enforced, but
the law was on the books all the same. I’m sure some people thought about it.
I’m sure Mary got some dark looks when she went to synagogue on Saturdays. “A
child out of wedlock, eh? And she used to be such a good girl!”

Then came the news that everyone in Israel had to travel back to their
ancestral home town to be registered for taxation purposes. It couldn’t have
happened at a worse time – Mary was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, and now
she would have to make the hard journey south to Bethlehem. Tradition says she
rode on a donkey – tradition has even given us songs about the little donkey –
but the truth is that we have no idea whether she rode or walked. But we know
for sure that it must have been an awful journey for her.

And then, after Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, we’re told that there
was ‘no room for them at the inn’. Well, actually, the word used in the Bible
might not mean ‘inn’; a more accurate translation might be ‘because there was
no guest room available for them’ (Luke 2:7b NIV 2011). If Joseph’s family came
from Bethlehem, it would make sense that he would try to stay with relatives
when he arrived. But I expect that the relatives had the problem of space:
there were so many people coming home for the census, and there was just
nowhere to stay in the house.

Where was the baby born? Tradition tells us in a stable, but the New
Testament doesn’t say that. It simply says, ‘She wrapped him in cloths and
placed him in a manger’ (Luke 2:7). We can be sure that the circumstances were
uncomfortable, anyway – not the maternity ward at the local hospital, if they
had had such a thing – or even a comfortable room in a relative’s house.
Perhaps it was the room downstairs where the animals came in at night - a
common practice in that culture. We just don’t know.

What happens next? The king sends a death squad after the new baby. Joseph
is from the ancient royal family of King David, and there are rumours that this
baby is going to be the king God is sending to set his people free. The present
King is a tyrant who doesn’t like this revolutionary talk about freedom. So he
sends his soldiers to kill every male child under two years old in Bethlehem,
just to make sure he’s got rid of the threat to his throne. So Jesus gets
caught up in this first century political crossfire; Joseph and Mary and the
young Jesus only just get out of there in time, and they escape into Egypt.

So now the holy family are refugees. In order to be safe, they have to live
for a while in a foreign country, where they have to learn a different language
and get used to strange customs. Their religion makes them different from the
people around them, and they have to get used to strange looks and whispers
behind their backs. Not until King Herod dies do they feel free to return to
their own land.

This is the Christmas story, you see. It’s not a story of pure
unadulterated partying and cheerfulness. It’s not just tidings of comfort and
joy. It’s about ordinary people being called by God, and going through all
sorts of struggles and difficulties in the course of doing what God asks of
them. God comes among us in Jesus but he doesn’t remove himself from the pain
of ordinary human life; he plunges right into it. Think about the rest of the
story for a minute. Joseph disappears from view early in the gospels; after Jesus
is twelve years old, we hear no more of him. It seems likely that he died while
Jesus was still young, so Jesus experienced the sharp pain of bereavement. He
would then have been expected to take over the family business and provide for
his mother and brothers and sisters.

At age thirty Jesus left home and began a wandering ministry of teaching,
preaching, and healing. Very quickly his family came to the conclusion that he
was out of his mind, and they tried to take him home before he did himself any harm.
Not exactly an inspiring vote of confidence! His closest followers didn’t really
understand what he was on about, and when push came to shove, they all deserted
him and left him to die; one of them, in fact, informed on him to the
authorities. He was arrested on a trumped up charge, subjected to a mock trial,
and then tortured to death in one of the cruelest forms of execution ever
devised by human wickedness.

But note this: we Christians believe that God was in Jesus reconciling the
world to himself. If God had never been one of us – if he had stayed safely in
heaven – then God would not have been able to understand by experience what it
means to be a human being. We could tell him about our pain, and he might nod
sympathetically, but he could never have truthfully said, “I know how you
feel”. It’s only because God became a human being in Jesus that God can truly
‘know how we feel’

So if you are going through the pain of bereavement this Christmas,
remember that Jesus experienced that too. If you find yourself far away from
your home and your loved ones – well, Jesus and his family went through that
too when they had to run away to Egypt. If you feel isolated in your family and
misunderstood by your friends – well, Jesus experienced that too. If you feel
rejected and abandoned – in fact, if you feel grief or fear or pain of any kind
tonight – the Christmas story is for you. It tells us that God has come among
us and shared our troubles. So we can bring our pain to God in the confidence
that God understands it – from personal experience.

In our Gospel for tonight we read, ‘The Word became flesh and made his
dwelling among us’ (John 1:14). In his paraphrase of the Bible called ‘The
Message’, Eugene Peterson translates that verse like this: ‘The Word became
flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood’. Your neighbourhood; my neighbourhood. The places where we live,
where at any given time there are happy families and families breaking up –
newborn infants, and people who are grieving relatives who have died before
their time – people sharing a glass of wine over supper, and people who just
can’t stop drinking no matter how hard they try – people with good jobs and a secure
income, and people eating Kraft dinner who just don’t know where the next rent
cheque is coming from. That’s the sort of neighbourhood Jesus feels at home in.

So whatever pain you are struggling with tonight, I encourage you not to be
afraid to bring it to God. There are two ways you can do that in the context of
this service.

First, you can light a candle – an ancient symbol of prayer. We have
several candles on the altar, as you can see. In a moment we’ll be having a
time of quiet prayer and reflection, and during that time, if you want to offer
a prayer for your own needs or those of someone else, I encourage you to come
forward and light one of these prayer candles.

Second, you may have noticed that in your bulletin tonight there is a
little three by five card. If you would like prayer for a specific issue you’re
struggling with, or if you want to pray that sort of prayer on behalf of
someone else, I encourage you to write your request on that card, and then
bring it with you when you come forward to light your candle, and lay it on the
altar here. You can be as specific as you like; you can write the request in
detail, or just write the name and leave it at that. We will send these
requests around our church prayer chain and they will be prayed for all through
the Christmas season.

Let me close with a story that has always inspired me. Corrie Ten Boom was
a little old Dutch lady who was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp by the
Nazis during the Second World War; her crime was that she had helped Jewish
people to get away from those who were hunting them down. Corrie’s whole family
were involved in this, and she and her sister Betsy went to Ravensbruck
together. I need not describe for you the horrors they experienced in that concentration
camp, or the way that Betsy eventually died of the sufferings she endured
there; Corrie has written all about it in her book ‘The Hiding Place’. But what
I want to close with are the words Betsy spoke to Corrie just before she died.
She said, “You must go all over the world and tell people what we have
discovered here. You must tell them that there
is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still. And they will believe you,
because you have been here”.

There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still. That was true for
Corrie and Betsy, and it can be true for us tonight as well. So let us turn to
God in our pain and struggle, knowing that he hears our prayers and shares our
sufferings, and that nothing can ever separate us from his love for us.